British Library's Collections Research Articles

Manuskrip Beraksara Jawi Pada Khazanah Pustaka EAP British Library

Jawi script is Arabic/hijaiyah letters with 6 additional letters as local modifications which -when read or pronounced- form Malay words/sentences. This Jawi script is proof of the influence of Islam in the archipelago. This study is historical research employing literature analysis examining the Jawi script collection within the digital library provided by the Endangered Archives Program (EAP) Riau manuscripts: The Gateway to The Malay Intellectual World (EAP153). The data obtained was then analyzed qualitatively through historiography descriptive analysis. The data was then discussed by comparing with other literacy sources such as journals, books and internet sources. Malay manuscripts stored in the British Library EAP library & Linggam Cahaya Library consist of 454 manuscripts including 65 (14%) written in Dutch, 30 (6.6%) written in Indonesian, 3 (0.7%) written in Arabic, 2 (2) 0.4%) written in English and 353 Jawi manuscripts (78%) and 118 bi-lingual literature collections. Based on the Jawi manuscripts provided in the EAP British Library collection and that of Linggam Cahaya Library, it can be understood that the use of Jawi writing provides an overview of the socio-cultural conditions of Malay at the time. It is also revealed that there had been ups and downs in the use of Jawi script. In the 19th century Jawi writing was the government official script, the most mastered script by the community, a sign of identity and a resistance symbol against colonialism. The prestige of Jawi script began to decline since school system spread and the use of Latin script in the schooling world started as the impact of the ethical politics of 1901.

The official and personal seals of Tipu Sultan of Mysore

AbstractThis article looks at all the known seals of Tipu Sultan of Mysore (r. 1782-1799) particularly those found in the manuscripts which formed his Library collection, disbanded in 1799 after the fall of Seringapatam and subsequently divided between the East India Company London (now in the British Library), and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Kolkata. By focussing on the British Library collections certain patterns of usage have come to light, possibly indicating Tipu Sultan's linguistic and literary preferences.It gives me great pleasure to dedicate this article to Barbara Brend as a mark of appreciation for her patience and help, whose knowledge and advice has been of such benefit to a non-art historian. At the end of this article I highlight an important manuscript from the Royal Asiatic Society's collection which thanks to her sponsorship has now been digitised and is available on the web as part of the RAS digital collections.

Surat Bupati Cianjur Untuk Raffles (1816): Naskah Melayu Pertama yang Ditulis Menggunakan Aksara Latin

In this article, I discuss a letter from the first Raden Aria Adipati Prawiradireja (regent of Cianjur period 1813-1833) for Thomas Stamford Raffles. The letter, written on 11 Jumadilawal 1231 Hegira (April 9th, 1816), contain farewell speech to Raffles who have just finished his six-years service as Lieutenant-Governor Java and It's Dependencies. This letter is a British Library collection and it had been put in a ”bundle” coded Add Ms 45273. The letter interests me because it was written by used Latin script and in the Malay language. In fact, the local rulers in Java, in the second decade of the nineteenth century, usually used the Jawi script (on the Malay language) or the Java script (on the Javanese language) in the letter writing. The research result show that Raden Aria Adipati Prawiradireja was the first indigenous ruler who used the Roman script for writing of Malay language. But, the letter was not the first Malay manuscript that written by using the Latin script. It is because the Roman script has been used at least in the seventeenth century to translate the Bible.

Pinter's World: Relationships, Obsessions, and Artistic Endeavours

Pinter's World: Relationships, Obsessions, and Artistic Endeavours

THE FUNCTION AND POSITION OF PENGHULU IN RAFFLES’ KITAB HUKUM MANUSCRIPT (1814)

In this article, we discuss the function and position of penghulu in Java in the second decade of the nineteenth century. The object of this study is a manuscript from the British Library collection, coded Mss Eur D/742.1, ff. 155-166, that was issued by Thomas Stamford Raffles, the Lieutenant-Governor of Java, and Its Dependencies, on 11 February 1814. The manuscript actually regulates the general justice system. However, in this article, we will only discuss a number of rules that are directly related to the function and position of penghulu in the justice system. The paper will show that penghulu , in Raffles’ regulation, was functioned as an expert to be presented to a court. He must expound about Islamic law or customary law related to cases that were being handled by the court. In fact, when it was first formed in the early days of the Demak Sultanate (1475-1554), the penghulu was a representative of the sultan and is held responsible for the implementation of the rules of Islam. Meanwhile, in the field of law, the penghulu was head of the court.

Exhibiting the Maqdala Manuscripts: African Scribes: Manuscript Culture of Ethiopia

The major purpose of this article is to document the exhibition “African Scribes: Manuscript Culture of Ethiopia” (hereafter “African Scribes”), which opened on 6 February 2018 in the Sir John Ritblat Treasures of the British Library Gallery in London.Items in the Sir John Ritblat Treasures of the British Library Gallery range from the 4th century Codex Sinaiticus to John Lennon's letters. The display tells the I literary history of Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Out of the 240 items on permanent display, there are only two items from Ethiopia representing Africa.The main objectives of the “African Scribes” exhibition were to pay tribute to unknown Ethiopian scribes and artists and also, to a certain extent, to direct attention to some diverse and significant items in the British Library collection that had never been on display before. The display explored the art, binding and calligraphy of manuscripts of Ethiopia.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Politics, Print Culture and the Habermas Thesis Cluster

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Politics, Print Culture and the Habermas Thesis Cluster

Grey literature at The British Library: revealing a hidden resource

PurposeTo explore the changing nature of grey literature, the British Library collections of grey literature and the future challenges of collecting and supplying this type of material.Design/methodology/approachThis article provides an informal description of the British Library grey literature collection and views on challenges in acquiring and supplying grey literature.FindingsThe nature of grey literature is changing in an increasingly electronic environment. In this new environment of electronic access there is still a need and demand for organisations to collect, preserve and make this material accessible.Originality/valueProvides an insight in to the British Library treatment of grey literature.

An Inestimable Debt

An Inestimable Debt Reviewed by Michel W. Pharand The British Library Catalogue of George Bernard Shaw Papers. Edited by Anne Summers. London: British Library, 2005. xvii + 321 pp. Index. £50.00. "It became his club, his university, a refuge, and the center of his life for almost a decade"—Michael Holroyd's description of the British Museum, whose Reading Room served as Shaw's surrogate home for most of the 1880s, reminds us of the crucial role the institution played in Shaw's self-education. And what Shaw took from the library by way of facts and ideas, knowledge and insights, has now been returned to us a hundredfold by way of this handsome, practical, user-friendly volume. Although some of the information in this hardcopy Catalogue can be found in the Manuscripts Online Catalogue, this volume "has made it possible to edit and structure some 4,000 index entries . . . under additional headings." Dr. C. J. Wright, Head of Manuscripts, acknowledges in his foreword the "many pairs of curatorial hands," including editor Anne Summers (assisted by William Frame), involved in sorting and cataloging the massive holdings acquired over a period of seven decades, as well as "the scholarly help and encouragement of Dan H. Laurence and Michael Holroyd." What is amazing is that such a detailed record of these holdings is able to fit into a single book with normal-sized print font and intelligent cross-indexing. The uncredited introduction (presumably by Summers) provides an excellent overview of the background to the British Library's acquisitions of Shaw materials. The "Descriptive Lists" section supplements (and precedes) the index with information about the provenance of manuscripts, subsequent rearrangement (if any), and intellectual (literary, social, political) context. Notable additions have included the papers of T. J. Wise (1938), Charlotte Shaw (1971), and G. K. Chesterton (1990); the collection at Ayot St. Lawrence (1982); and two important sources of Shaw manuscripts: the "Lord Chamberlain's Plays" and "Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence," containing "many Shaw scripts, often annotated either by the playwright's or the Censor's pen," in particular Mrs Warren's Profession,The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, and Geneva. The alphabetized index, which forms the bulk of the volume (pp. 81–321), is a model of concision, each entry containing enough information to fully contextualize each document or individual. Aside from the larger collections of correspondence—William Archer, Max Beerbohm, G. K. Chesterton, Alfred Douglas, Harley Granville-Barker, Frank Harris, T. E. Lawrence, William Morris, Gilbert Murray, Auguste Rodin, Henry Salt, Ellen Terry, and H. G. Wells (to name only a few)—we find letters from publishers, booksellers, translators, authors, journalists, socialists, suffragists, theater managers, actors and actresses, spelling reformers, anti-vaccinationists, and anti-vivisectionists. [End Page 226] Everyone, it seems, wrote to Shaw: from Henry Light, captain of the Vegetarian Cycling Club, to the Begum Atiya of Aiwane Raf'at of Bombay. There are letters from ministers, journalists, engineers, architects, physicians, barristers and solicitors, schoolchildren, photographers, artists, musicians, economists, inventors, members of Parliament, a woolen merchant, a draper, a tobacconist, a private detective, a mechanic, a railway clerk, a metallurgist, a copper smelter, a chiropodist, two osteopaths, two dentists, two hairdressers, three eugenicists, a professor of theoretical astronomy, a pipe organ builder, an inmate of California's San Quentin Prison, and one Arthur Hinton, "former criminal." The documents in the British Library collections are as varied as one would expect from a man whose interests were myriad and whose life spanned the Victorian Age to the Atomic Age. There is a copy of Shaw's 1902 "phrenological assessment," his horoscope (ca. 1914), and his 1928 "Naprapathic Chart Book"; a 1928 letter from chirognomist Noel Jacquin and a 1930 palm reading; Shaw's 1947 certificate of membership in the British Interplanetary Society—yes, at ninety-one Shaw was interested in space exploration!—and a 1949 letter from Arthur Davies (of Santa Monica, California) asking Shaw if he believed in ghosts. (To find out if he did...

Illuminations from Books of Hours by Janet Backhouse (review)

REVIEWS 215 distinction between essence and existence; page after page of argumentation cement the work’s place in the highest tier of philosophical achievement. The sheer complexity of the Metaphysics engenders in the reader a compulsion to reduce the entire narrative to propositions, but this is a most worthwhile endeavor , and one of which Avicenna would surely have approved. DAVID BENNETT, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA Janet Backhouse, Illuminations from Books of Hours (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2004) 160 pp., ill. Janet Backhouse’s Illumination from Books of Hours is a lovely selection of 140 or so plates from Books of Hours in the collections of the British Library. Despite her own long-standing authority as a scholar of Books of Hours in particular—and illuminated manuscripts in general—Backhouse focuses the reader’s attention here on the stunning visual testimony of the illuminations themselves, rather than on scholarship concerning them. The plates appear alone, without commentary, following a short introduction. The most immediately striking feature of this volume is its diminutive size. The quality of the reproductions is as luxurious as that of many a hefty coffee table book, but the dimensions are more on the scale of a slim paperback novel. This welcome measure allows us to experience the illuminations (which are shown in their actual size when possible) in a format approximating their original incarnation in Books of Hours. Though few modern readers will likely find occasion to carry this collection around as an accessory the way the original owners might have, it is a pleasure to be able to hold this book easily up to the best light and plunge one’s nose into it in order to appreciate the finest details of the images. Backhouse’s introduction offers a straightforward explanation of what Books of Hours are—their content and use, how details concerning their production and ownership may be deduced, their history as a valuable social and economic commodity. More captivating is Backhouse’s discussion of the British Library collections the plates are drawn from. Where a manuscript languishes at present generally has little bearing on what most scholars and collectors hope to access through it—namely, a glimpse of the world that produced and consumed it in its first blush. Backhouse’s brief history of the British Library collections reminds us of several things: that these manuscripts have a long and legitimate history extending beyond their time and place of origin; that the institutions which hold many of them today have, as well, their own interesting histories; that the phenomenon of collecting (by institutions as well as individuals) lends a rejuvenated vitality to Books of Hours which rivals—in its own way—the interest they aroused when they were new. Backhouse reflects that the “status [of Books of Hours] as objects of desire has continued into modern times, with examples of particular interest or quality exciting rivalry among collectors and attracting sale room prices at least equal in contemporary terms to the value put upon them by their original owners” (8). Setting scholarly theories aside, Backhouse reminds us that these manuscripts possess a sort of magnetism which assures that they will always be more timeless than antiquated. In a further nod to the British Library, Backhouse borrows the manuscripts’ REVIEWS 216 order of acquisition as the organizing principle for this volume, which results (she speculates) “in a pleasingly random mixture of dates and places of origin, while at the same time providing an unusual overview of the way in which one particular part of the manuscript collection has evolved” (9). The distribution of images is, as it happens, very pleasantly random and diverse, and their subtle framing within a more modern than historical context lends currency to their interest. CHRISTINE THUAU, French & Francophone Studies, UCLA Günter Bandmann, Early Medieval Architecture as Bearer of Meaning, trans. Kendall Wallis (New York: Columbia University Press 2005) 368 pp. Kendall Wallis’s recent translation of Günter Bandmann’s Mittelalterliche Architektur als Bedeuntungsträger (1951) marks the first time the Englishspeaking world can enjoy direct access to this seminal work of medieval architectural scholarship. Due to the half-century lapse between publication and translation...

Accidental Archives: Tracing Africa in the India Office Private Papers in the British Library

This article deals with the British Library's collections on Africa, and especially with its collection of private papers of India Office officials (with a particular focus on the twentieth century). The choice of India-related collections may seem surprising, but in fact these records contain much that is relevant to African history.In this article I am concerned not only to describe what is held at the British Library, but to discuss the historical construction of these collections. That is, how factors that might be thought mundane and pedestrian - decisions about the selection or destruction of records, and their preservation and arrangement - affect both the nature of archival holdings and the scholarship built upon them.

Life Cycle Collection Management

Life cycle collection management is a way of taking a long-term approach to the responsible stewardship of the British Library's collections and is one of the Library's strategic strands. It defines the different stages in a collection item's existence over time. These stages range from selection and acquisitions processing, cataloguing and press marking, through to preventive conservation, storage and retrieval. Life cycle collection management seeks to identify the costs of each stage in order to show the economic interdependencies between the phases over time. It thereby aims to demonstrate the long-term consequences of what the library takes into its collections, by making explicit the financial and other implications of decisions made at the beginning of the life cycle for the next 100 plus years. This paper describes the work over the past year at the British Library on this complex and complicated subject. It presents the emerging findings and suggests how it can be used for practical reasons (by individual curators and selectors) and for economic, governance and political purposes. The paper describes the next steps in the project, for example, on a predictive data model. The British Library is seeking to benchmark itself against comparable organisations in this area. It intends to work with others on specific comparison for example, of life cycle costing of electronic and paper journals, as a prelude to eliding digital and 'traditional' formats.

Market Research: A Guide to The British Library Collections (9th edition)

Market Research: A Guide to The British Library Collections (9th edition)

The Senior Manuscripts: Another Collection of Gandhāran Buddhist Scrolls

In 1994 the British Library acquired a collection of twenty-nine fragments of birch bark scrolls containing various Buddhist texts written in Kharosthi script and (Prakrit) language (Salomon 1997). At the time, these were virtually the only known specimens of what must have been a very extensive Gandharan Buddhist literature, with the exception of one other manuscript, namely the famous Gandhari Dharmapada, which had been discovered in 1892 near Khotan in what is now the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of China. In 1996 the British Library/University of Washington Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project was constituted to study and publish this new collection. To date four volumes of studies of the British Library scrolls have been published (Salomon 1999, Salomon 2000, Allon 2001, Lenz 2003), and several further volumes are in progress. Since the project was inaugurated in 1996, a large amount of additional related material has come to light. Most of this new material is contained in three major collections. The first of these is the Sch0yen collection of Buddhist manuscripts, which includes, in addition to several thousand fragments of Buddhist texts in Sanskrit and Brahmi script, 238 small fragments in Kharosthi script and a sanskritized variety of the language (see Salomon 2001), written on palm leaf in folio or pothi format. Study and publication of the Kharosthi portion of the Sch0yen collection has been begun by members of the Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project in cooperation with Professor Jens Braarvig of the University of Oslo, who is supervising the publication of the Sch0yen collection as a whole (Braarvig 2000; Braarvig 2002; Allon and Salomon 2000; Salomon 2002a). Another collection, smaller but still significant, of manuscripts on palm-leaf folios is the eight fragments in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, which were found by the Pelliot expedition in the northern Tarim Basin (Salomon 1998). The third additional major collection of manuscripts (the fourth in total, including the British Library collection), and the one which is the subject of this article,1 is the

Supplementary Handlist of Persian Manuscripts, 1966-1998

The British Library's collection of Persian manuscripts has been further enhanced with the publication of G.M. Meredith-Owens' handlists of 1895-1996 acquisition. This indexed supplementary hand list contains concise descriptions of over 400 manuscript texts.

Eighteenth-Century Spanish Chapbooks in the British Library: A Descriptive Catalogue

This catalogue is a supplement to Short-title Catalogue of Eighteenth-Century Spanish Books in the British (1994) compiled by Harold Whitehead. It covers more ephemeral material which was omitted from the British Library General Catalogue. It contains some 300 products of the popular press, hitherto unavailable to researchers. The term chapbook (in Spanish, Libros de Cordel), denotes cheaply-produced tracts for sale to ordinary people. Sold by hawkers, who would often sing or recite the contents for the benefit of prospective buyers, they represent a vivid repository of popular culture. Usually a single printed sheet, folded several times, these chapbooks were often adorned by woodcuts. Many are exceptionally rare. Each entry is fully catalogued, and there are indexes of printers and booksellers, places of printing and subjects and places referred to in the text. The illustrations have been chosen to represent the range of material in the British Library's collection.

Second Supplementary Catalogue of Hebrew Books in the British Library, 1893-1960 (review)

Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 401 Reviews on-line into its ALEPH catalogue. There the records are being updated in accordance with data provided in the Supplement of Addenda and Corrigenda , where they are available for reference on an international plane. Jay Rovner Jewish Theological Seminary New York, Jv.Y 10027 jarovner@jtsa.edu SECOND SUPPLEMENTARY CATALOGUE OF HEBREW BOOKS IN THE BRITISH LIBRARY, 1893-1960. Prepared for publication by Diana Rowland Smith based on the work of David Goldstein, Cyril Moss, and others. Vol. 1, pp. xi + 588. Vol. 2, pp. 5891136 . London: The British Library, 1994. Cloth, $450.00. The British Library's collection of Hebraica has been built up over some two hundred and fifty years, dating back to the founding of the British Museum in 1753. This collection achieved world class status in 1848, with the acquisition of the library of H. J. Michael of Hamburg, and so it has remained since then. The strength of the collection and the quality of J. Zedner's Catalogue ofHebrew Books in the British Museum (London, 1867; reprinted 1964) have made a catalogue of the collection an indispensable bibliographical tool. S. von Straalen provided the first supplement, the Catalogue of Hebrew Books in the British Museum Acquired During the Years 1868-1892 (London, 1894; reprinted 1977). Despite the attempts of several scholars subsequently associated with the Hebrew Book Collection (von Straalen among them), a second supplement was never published until the appearance of these magnificent volumes which were prepared for publication by Diana Rowland Smith. A flurry of British Library publications over the last few years has been fortuitous for the provision of access to the Hebrew books and manuscripts of the Library. Among them are J. Leveen's List ofHebrew. Aramaic. and Arabic Manuscripts Believed to be Derived from the Cairo Genizah (1994); Catalogue ofHebrew Printers (ca. 1500-ca. 1900) as represented in the holdings ofthe British Museum •..reproduced from the unpublished manuscript...compiled by S. von Straalen, with indexes by Brad Sabin Hill (1995); The Catalogue of Gaster Mss. in the British Museum reproduced ...by Jacob Leveen, Joseph Rosenwasser, and David Goldstein (1996); Books Printed on Vellum in the Collections of the British Library compiled by R. C. Alston with a Catalogue of the Hebrew Books Printed on Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 402 Reviews Vellum compiled by Brad Sabin Hill (1966). Amongst these, the Rowland Smith Catalogue, two massive volumes of detailed bibliographic descriptions of about 9000 items acquired between 1893-1960, stands out as a magnificent bibliographic guide to Hebrew printing. The chronology of this catalogue does not do justice to the dates of the books themselves. Among them are twelve incunabula, including one item printed in Rome between 1469 and 1472. Six were printed in Spain or Portugal before the Expulsion. The Library's collection of Hebrew incunabula is unrivaled in Europe today. About twelve items acquired after 1960, mostly liturgies, were snuck into the Catalogue because of their importance . In its devotion to the Hebrew book, the Library also collects non-Hebrew titles which contain a sizable quantity of matter in Hebrew or which relate directly to the books and manuscripts of its Hebrew Section. The bibliographic descriptions include the following data: the title, the title in romanized form, additional titles found on separate pages, a description of the contents, languages used where this has not been indicated in the description, pagination, publication information, size, and shelf number. The catalogue is organized according to authors' names or uniform title headings for anonymous works. Secondary access is provided by title indexes, one for Hebrew titles, another for non-Hebrew titles. The organization of the catalogue and its indices are valuable for author and title searches. Its usefulness for scholars in general would have been enhanced by the provision of a subject index. Bibliographers would have benefited from indices of publishers/printers, places, and dates. One may wonder, why, in this time of computerized bibliographies, online shared access to the collections of many libraries (in the utilities, OCLC and RLIN, the latter of which now has Harvard University Library 's records, albeit in romanized form only, and provides for searching on Hebrew text-strings and will, in...

British Library Collections on the History and Culture of Science, Technology and Medicine

British Library Collections on the History and Culture of Science, Technology and Medicine

Silent Printers: Anonymous Printing at Venice in the Sixteenth Century.

In this study a leading expert on the history of the early Italian book examines a perplexing and intractable problem that faces historical bibliographers - the identification of anonymous printing. Venice quickly became one of the major publishing centres of Renaissance Europe, serviced by innumerable printers. While the products of many of the presses are easily identified today, many of the surviving books offer little or no evidence as to their origins. Their title-pages may simply state Venetiis or Venetia; the name of the publisher or bookseller may be given, but not the printer; or no information may be given at all. In such instances the bibliographer must make an identification by comparing the anonymously printed volume with known examples of a printer's work. This often proves difficult, since in Venice there was a great deal of interloaning of initials, devices and other materials between printers, who seem often to have been friends rather than rivals. Occasionally it is nearly impossible to be certain to whom a particular device really belonged. Despite these and other problems, Dennis Rhodes has succeeded in establishing the identity of the anonymous printers of over 250 different volumes in the British Library's collections. Each volume is fully described, and 150 black and white photographs of type ornaments and other identifying features are included.

Norah M. Titley: Persian miniature Painling and its influence on the ort of Turkey and India: the British Library collection. 272 pp. London: The British Library, 1983. £25.

Norah M. Titley: Persian miniature Painling and its influence on the ort of Turkey and India: the British Library collection. 272 pp. London: The British Library, 1983. £25.